ISLAMABAD: Two years on, the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) is yet to resolve the issue of unpaid teachers and staff, who were hired in 2012 for running 11 computer labs in various technical institutions.

Computer science is taught as a compulsory subject in grades six to eight in FDE-run schools, but the directorate has failed in streamlining the programme.

The FDE had appointed 24 computer science teachers, 17 lab in-charges and 50 lab attendants in 2012 under an information technology project titled ‘Provision of 11 Computer Labs’.

According to the PC-1 for the project, the FDE was to regularise the services of these employees after the two-year project was complete, which was not done. They have also not been paid their salaries for two years.

The teachers and lab staff were hired in 2012 and were to be regularised within two years

“We have been teaching without salaries for two years. What is our fault? At the time of appointment, we were told our services will be regularised at the end of the two-year contract,” said Saqib Satti, a teacher.

He said that the Islamabad High Court had also directed the FDE last year to send the cases of their regularisation to a concerned committee for the federal government, but the direction was not complied with.

However, Mr Satti said the cases were forwarded to the committee a few days ago.

“We have also decided to move a contempt of court petition against the FDE,” he said.

Another teacher said that the Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) additional secretary had recently assured the teachers that they will be paid their pending salaries on a priority basis.

When asked, FDE Director Finance Tahir Mustafa Khosa said that the file for paying teachers their salaries was moved to the finance ministry and that their regularisation cases were moved to a committee headed by senior bureaucrat Haseeb Athar.

FDE Director Planning Taj Bhatti refused to talk and said: “We are resolving the matter”.

A source at the CADD ministry said that CADD high-ups, including the additional secretary, had expressed displeasure over the FDE’s performance, saying that if the directorate was facing legal issues with regularising the services of the teachers, it should have issued termination letters after the expiry of the contract and that the FDE had complicated the case by neither terminating the employees nor regularising their services.

He said that CADD had also written to the Establishment Division a few days ago to seek its input over the matter.

Former bureaucrat Nazar Hussein said that the FDE’s planning wing is responsible for not regularising the services of the teachers after their contracts had ended.

These teachers are teaching around 10,000 students in 11 schools, he said, adding that the CADD ministry and FDE should resolve this issue.

Published in Dawn November 17th, 2016